Now, at the risk of being repetitious, I
want to read a passage which I had
been talking about for several Sundays, and then
when Paris Readhead came, without ever checking with
each other, he talked about it too, but
it's Paul in the Ephesian epistle, the fourth
chapter, with the eighth verse where he says,
Wherefore, when he ascended up on high, Jesus,
he led captivity captive, and he gave gifts
unto men.
Now that he ascended, what is it but
that he also descended first into the lower
parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same that ascended
up far above all heaven that he might
fill all things.
And he gave some apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors,
teachers, and he did this for the perfecting
of the saints to the work of the
ministry.
That is, not as it says in verse
12 in the way we have it arranged
here.
You see, God didn't put the commas in.
The translators put the commas in, and they
have a comma there for the perfecting of
the saints, for the work of the ministry,
for the edifying of the body of Christ.
Those are three things.
Take the commas out, because they don't belong
there.
Here's what it says.
He did this, he gave these gifts for
the perfecting of the saints to do the
work of the ministry unto the edifying of
the body of Christ.
The work of the ministry which the saints
is to do, are to do, the work
is the edifying of the body of Christ.
And the ministry there is not the ordained
ministry, but it is the ministry of all
the body of Christ, the Christians, all of
you Christians.
You have a work to do, and it
is the building up of the body of
Christ until we all come in the unity
of the faith and of the knowledge of
the Son of God unto a perfect man,
the measure of the stature of the wholeness
of Christ.
Verse 14 says you don't get tossed back
and forth anymore.
Now you will notice, particularly new people will
notice, and we're always having new people here
because we're such a very great turnover in
our congregation.
We're in a part of the city where
there are changes being made, and we lose
so many.
We've lost so many since July who have
moved away, moved anywhere from north to south
or east to west, and they can't come,
and so we lose them.
But we get others, and there must be
a continual laying before the people what it
is we believe here and what we stand
for and what kind of people we are.
Now, you will notice, if you've been around
just a little while, that there are a
lot of things missing here which you find
in a lot of churches.
It's always very hard to keep from drawing
uncomplimentary comparisons, which I don't mean to do.
What others are doing, God will have to
deal with them.
But what we're doing, we're responsible for.
And according to what we see in the
scriptures, there are only about five methods, or
maybe we should say four, whereby God does
his work, his final work, his eternal work.
One is by consecration to Christ's glory alone
on the part of Christians.
We do not recognize here merely performers.
We don't recognize performers.
We don't believe that God means that performers
are to come in, that we're to be
a kind of a religious stage upon which
performers are to come and take their bow
and do their little work and go again.
We don't think that's God's way of doing
it.
We believe his way of doing it is
that the people, the good people, not the
brilliant people always, but the plain people like
you and me, that the plain people, we
Christians, what the Bible so tenderly calls the
common people.
Politicians in our day like to use the
word the common man, and they do it
for political purposes.
And our trouble, of course, is we have
too many common men in Washington.
Now, you can just have that for what
it is worth.
But they say common men because they're political,
but the Bible says the common people, and
that's a dear term to God.
And Jesus was always surrounded by the common
people.
He had some stars, too, but mainly they
were common people.
And the consecration of these common people to
Christ and to his glory, now that's the
only thing God recognizes.
And then the prayer of faith to those
people, to be able to pray the prayer
of faith.
Would I ask you an embarrassing question if
I asked when you had your last prayer
answered?
The prayer of faith.
It should be a prayer that can engage
God and that can meet God's conditions and
turn loose the third condition, which is the
power of the Holy Spirit.
Now, Brother Reed had preached this for a
week, but I repeated this morning that only
the power of the Holy Spirit can do
any real lasting work.
Nobody else can do it.
The gifts of nature aren't enough.
The gifts of nature, the natural gifts.
There are natural gifts that people have.
Musicians have natural gifts.
In times of those natural gifts, I had
a cousin by the name of Winnie.
I don't know what his right name was,
but we called him Winnie.
And they said about him very proudly that
he could play any instrument he laid his
hand on.
I'll bet it was good.
I don't know.
But you can have gifts like that.
You can have such gifts.
Some people have them.
They're good any place you put them.
But you can't do holy work in that
way.
Only the Holy Ghost can do holy work.
And then by the exercises of the Spirit's
gifts, the giving of these gifts to men
and the exercising of these gifts, that is,
there must always be power present.
Just as you have in your home, say,
a washer.
All right, now that's a gift.
That's an organ.
And if you put clothing in that, and
water and detergents, you can wash.
You have a dryer maybe in your home.
There is a second thing that you have,
and that does its work.
And you have a refrigerator, and that does
its work.
And maybe you have a radio, and that's
an organ, too.
And maybe you have a heater for some
of the rooms that don't quite get warm
enough.
And you can add to that any of
the appliances we hear so much about now,
and up to a dozen or fifteen different
appliances, electrical appliances maybe in the home.
And they're all built to do a certain
work.
But without the power, they'll never do that
work.
They'll never do it.
There must be power applied.
And so in the work of God, in
the church of God, there's your fellow who
can play anything he can pick up.
He is an organ, he's an instrument.
But without the power of the Holy Ghost
in him and what he does, he might
just as well stay somewhere else.
And so it is with a man who
can speak, so it is with a man
who can teach, so it is with everybody
who may have natural gifts.
The mighty Spirit of God has to animate
and quicken and give those overtones of creativeness,
or else you don't have a church at
all.
Years ago, there was a great preacher in
Houston City.
He was one of the greatest.
His sermons always appeared in the front page
in the newspapers on Monday, after they were
preached on Sunday.
And his books sold like hotcakes.
And he was known all over, and he'd
go to England and draw great crowds, and
they'd mob his great place to hear him.
Well, he wasn't a Bible preacher, although he
believed in the scriptures.
He was what we'd call an evangelical now.
But he didn't preach the Bible, he preached
subjects, and he talked about nature and science
and literature and philosophy and all the rest.
And the result was, when he died, the
bottom dropped out of the work that he
had.
God wasn't in it, and the whole thing
fell apart.
When Spurgeon in London died, his work went
right on.
When Campbell Morgan died, his work went right
on, because they built it on the word
of God and the power of the Spirit.
And no matter what a man may do,
or how successful he may seem to be
in any field, writing, preaching, anything, if the
Holy Spirit is not energizing his work, it
will fall apart when he dies.
And the terrible part about it is, he'll
be dead and not know it, and he'll
have to find it out in that great
day when the Lord judges the works of
every man, and there shall be wood, hay
and stubble.
This fact that it's by the energizing of
the Holy Spirit that God's lasting work is
done, is very hard on the flesh.
God is very kind and tender, but he's
very tough on the flesh, that is, he's
tough on carnality, he's tough on proud flesh.
And the fact that nobody, no matter how
gifted or how ingenious he may be, can
do the work of God, that fact makes
it very hard, and it submerges the worker
in the work.
It frustrates the carnal desire to give and
receive honor, and it starves the appetite for
glory which lies at the root of every
one of us.
At the bottom of our hearts there lies
a desire for glory, and all you have
to do now is to get converted and
bring that desire over into the Church, and
you can spend a lifetime of religious work
doing nothing but getting glory for yourself.
But when we understand that no human gifts,
no human power can do the work of
God finally, but it must be the energizing
work of the Spirit alone, then the bottom
falls out of all of our glory and
all of our human pride.
And God gets all the glory, and that's
mighty hard on the flesh.
And any method that man uses to carry
on the work that isn't spiritual, as I've
named here, it feeds the flesh.
Now, I call heaven and earth to witness,
my friends, that if you hear these words
and follow them, that you shall certainly prosper
and we shall certainly prosper and be fruitful.
Now, what are we aiming for?
You say, but what are you aiming for,
Mr. Pilgrim?
Are you going anyplace?
Is there anything that the Church is trying
to do?
Or are you simply going around the religious
merry-go-round, riding the wooden horse, holding
on to the painted mane of the painted
horse, round and round with a little musical
accompaniment?
Is that what you're here for?
Well, some people would think so, I suppose.
But I know a good deal better than
that.
For instance, we are here because we believe
that it's the will of God that a
company of people should meet in the name
of Christ as an assembly of redeemed believers,
and that among other things there should be
marvelous answers to prayer, that God hears and
actually answers our prayer.
And one miraculous answer to prayer in a
congregation will do more to help that congregation
to solidify it and to encourage it and
cheer it up and cause it to lift
up the hands that hang down and strengthen
the feeble knees than all the advertising you
can do in the wide world.
So we believe in the presence of God
here, and we don't want anything that disturbs
or grieves that presence of God.
And if we knew we could have $100
,000 this morning laid at our feet, we
would not take it if we thought it
would disturb or in any wise grieve the
gentle presence of God.
Then such a thing as revival wonders.
When I was a very young preacher, I
preached on revivals and how to have them.
I have my old outline here.
But I learned shortly afterward that that's very
easy to do but very hard to make
good on.
But what I mean by a revival wonder
is that within the Church, somebody suddenly enters
out into a new and grand and wonderful
spiritual experience.
And let that happen to just one person.
Let that happen to one young person.
Hear me, you young people.
You wonder how you can make your young
people's work prosper.
All right, now I'll tell you.
Just let one young person enter out into
a new, wonderful spiritual experience, and it will
do more to cause your young people's work
to lift and go and get off the
sandbar than all of your Sunday afternoon interviews
and talks.
They are all right, too, friends.
But I'm trying to think of conferences, that's
the word.
And all of our conferences and committee meetings,
they are good, and I want you to
have them.
But just let one person get through to
the mighty Holy Ghost, and it will do
more to bless and cheer the spiritual fallout
that will come out on everybody around about
you.
And it's the same everywhere else.
Just let somebody get blessed in some sphere,
somewhere, and all around the circle, everybody will
be helped by it.
Now, I believe in that.
And we don't believe that can be super
-induced.
We don't believe that can be bought.
We don't believe that can be brought in
on an airplane or by a freight.
We don't believe we can get that except
as the Holy Spirit energizes his people, energizes
the Word as it's preached.
And then, joyfulness.
I believe in the joyfulness of the children
of God.
You know me, that I am not exactly
what might be called by nature an optimistic
man, not particularly cheerful.
But the joy of the Lord is still
the strength of his people.
And I believe that the sad world is
attracted to spiritual sunshine.
Now, I know there is a kind of
spiritual sunshine.
Some churches train their people just the same
as Fuller Brush Company trains their salesmen, to
know how to smile and show all their
43 teeth and to do all that sort
of thing.
But I can sense that.
When I go into a church and I'm
greeted by a man that has been trained
to greet me, I know I'm taking the
flipper of a trained seal.
I know it!
But when the Holy Ghost is in the
congregation and they are just spontaneously joyful and
can't keep the grin back, it has a
wonderful effect on people.
There is the old stock story of the
Moravians on board ships with the storm, and
everybody was scared, including the sailors.
And John Wesley was there, and he was
scared, too.
And the Moravians sat around saying psalms.
And Wesley said, If I had what they
have, I'd give the world.
And somebody said, You can have it.
So he went back and talked to one
of them, Peter Bowler, back in England after
he arrived there, and got blessed.
And he said, I felt a strange warming
in my heart.
And out of that strange warming was born
Methodism, so the joyfulness of the children of
God.
I have said this a hundred times, that
the reason we have to have so much
to cheer us up is that we're not
cheerful inside.
A man can be cheerful and not have
anything to cheer him.
I think about dear old Brother Lilly, the
black man, the black brother.
God knows his skin was black, and nobody
get offended.
It was black.
He had a black face.
God gave it to him, and he wasn't
ashamed of it.
Black face.
But he had a heart that shone like
the noonday sun.
And he was a happy man.
He was a happy man.
Well, happiness is very desperately needed.
Do you know why?
And I say this with no intention of
raising a titter of laughter, but do you
know why someone like the famed Elvis Presley
can be so widely, widely loved by the
multitude?
Just because they're sad.
They don't have anything there to cheer them.
And they see around about them a world
that looks mighty tragically bad, and they hear,
even though they refuse to listen, they catch
bits from the radio, not the newspaper, about
H-bombs and A-bombs and Russia and
cancer and polio and coronary thrombosis.
And they're worried.
People are worried.
Young fellows in high school are worried.
They're worried because they say, What's the use?
What's the use?
They pull me into the service, and I'm
sunk.
And if a war comes, I'm done.
What's the use?
And so the psychology of our kids, the
psychology is a gloomy psychology.
And the young women say, Well, what's the
use?
I go over to the young fellow, and
we plan to marry, and bang, they've gotten
him into the service, and if something happens,
he's gone and may be dead, and here
I am sitting back here wearing a ring
with nobody attached to it.
And don't smile.
Now, this is real with a lot of
our people.
Real.
Businessmen say, Well, what's the use?
They take it all away in taxes, and
so it goes.
People are worried, and a sense of gloom
is on people.
Well, of course, if somebody can come along
that acts happy, even though he acts drunk,
if he comes along and sounds happy, they'll
go wild about him.
And that's the psychology underneath the strange phenomenon
known as Elvis Presley.
And, of course, much others the same.
But the Christians ought to, as Brother Brown
always says, preempt that.
The Christians ought to be there first.
The Christians should be the happiest people in
the world, and they shouldn't have to get
it anywhere but in the Bible and from
the God above.
They should be the happiest people in the
world, the joyful people.
A very sharp, penetrating woman came to this
church one time, and she went away from
here, and she said, Mr. Toedtner, your people
are not a happy people.
I defended you.
I said you were, but I don't know
whether I over-defended you or not.
How many of you brought trouble to church
with you this morning?
How many of you brought family trouble to
church here?
How many of you brought business trouble to
church here?
Only two months away or a little more
until income tax time.
How many of you brought worries here about
your health, brought worries about your physical condition
and about your children?
You brought them here.
God's people shouldn't love them around.
Why should the children of the king go
mourning all the day?
Why should the children of the king bow
their head like the bull rush?
Why should we not stand straight up and
thank our God?
Well, I believe that.
I believe we can get a company of
people who know how to reach God in
answer to prayer and get answers, a company
of people that have been, some of them
at any rate, met recently God in new
spiritual experiences.
I believe it will show in their face.
I don't believe we need very much more
to prosper as a people of God than
love for each other.
By this shall you know that you love
each other.
We should love each other.
I'm determined I'm going to love everybody.
It kills me.
I've got my heart.
I'm going to do it.
I'm going to love everybody, because it's so
easy to love some people.
First is Ed Maxey.
Every time I look at him, I grin.
Every time I think of him, I grin.
He's just lovable.
But I know lots of people are not
like that.
Brother, I'm afraid you're listening to one that
is.
Some people, only their mothers.
Yet I'm determined that I'm going to love
them.
By God's help, I'm going to love them.
Some people don't like me, but I'm going
to love them.
Some people don't like me so seriously and
so ferociously that I'm even afraid to go
and ask them why.
But I'm going to love them anyway, and
they're not going to be able to stop
me.
If the love of God is in the
hearts of people, and you know that your
love is of the will, and you can
will to love people, you can will to
love them.
Love is not a feeling.
Love is a willing.
And the Lord says love people.
All right.
He didn't mean feel love for them.
He meant will to love them.
And so the love of God.
And then we have another thing we believe
is scriptural, and that is good, joyful, revival
music.
The singing of good music.
Somebody wrote an ugly attack on me and
said that I didn't believe in religious entertainment,
but that hymn singing was entertainment.
Well, brother, you take that for what it's
worth.
I don't know how anybody could be so
far off the track and still be loose.
But anyway, the Holy Ghost sings in a
man.
The morning stars sang together, and all the
sons of God shouted for joy.
You know that everything God ever did, he
did through musical accompaniment.
You know that when he made the heaven
and the earth, the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for
joy.
You know when he led the children of
Israel across the Red Sea on their way
finally to Palestine, that Miriam grabbed the Salvation
Army tambourine and led off in the 15th
chapter of Exodus one of the most rhapsodic
songs you ever heard.
And did you know that when Jesus went
out to die, having sung a hymn, they
went to the Mount of Olives?
And did you know that when he rose
from the dead, he said, I will sing
among my brethren.
That's in the 22nd Psalm, a prophecy according
to all the traditional beliefs of the Church,
a prophecy of the resurrected Jesus.
He sang among them.
And did you know that when the Holy
Ghost came at Pentecost, they became a singing
church?
And did you know that every time there
was a new poured out blessing down the
centuries, they became a singing people?
And do you know now that we are
forced to sing the songs that were born
out of revivals hundreds of years ago?
We're singing the revival of the friends of
God in the early 11th and 12th centuries.
We're singing the songs of the Moravians when
they had their revival.
We're singing the songs of Luther in the
time of the Reformation revival.
We're singing the songs of the Westleys at
the time of the Wesleyan revival.
And we're singing some of the Salvation Army
songs at the time of the General Booth
revival.
And we haven't had any new songs amounting
to anything in recent times because we haven't
had a revival born.
Brethren, if we can call down the blessing
of God as we should upon us, I
believe that there will be new songs written
in our day equal to those written in
other days to fit the thing God is
doing.
Or it may be a revitalizing and reactivating
of some of the songs.
When Camel Morgan left London and went to
Wales to see the Whale House revival, of
course they had great singing in his tabernacle
in London, his chapel they call it there,
in his great place.
But when he got back he stood up
and scolded the people.
He said, You've never sung in your life.
He said, I've just come back from Wales.
And he said, Such singing you never heard.
And they were singing the psalms like our
brother sang this morning.
They were singing the psalms, but they were
singing them with a buoyancy and lift that
helped bring people under conviction and helped get
other people to faith.
And the man of God saw the difference
and scolded his own congregation good-naturedly by
saying, You don't sing here.
Well, I believe in singing and I believe
in joyful gospel singing.
The expression, whether it be a camp meeting
song, such as Brother Thomas sang, I will
make the darkness light before thee.
What is wrong, I'll make it right before
thee.
I will make the crooked straight before thee,
and the high place I'll bring down.
Not Miltonic, you know, in its quality, but
an expression of honest people who love God
tremendously.
So I believe in that and we're going
to have it by the grace of God.
If any of you have nice sweet tenor
voices or big rumbling basses, we can use
you up here in the choir.
But if you can't come to the choir,
sing down there.
But the point is, we never want to
degenerate into just rumbling through a song service,
muddling through it.
And then there's the good word, the psalm
from the pulpit.
I'm not the greatest preacher of my day
by a long, long way.
But as long as I'm around, you're going
to hear good words from the pulpit, the
words of the living God.
You're going to hear books of the Bible
expounded and truth told and texts illuminated and
the word expounded and illustrated from the stories
of the Bible until the Bible is everything.
That we plan to do.
And sympathy of sympathy with each other.
God's sympathetic people.
I hope you're sympathetic people.
I hope all of you are sympathetic.
I hope you never can hear of anybody's
trouble without worrying over it, suffering over it
and being disturbed by it and taking it
to God in prayer.
Now this we hold in charity and this
we hold in understanding.
No censorious against others is intended.
No superior attitude is taken.
If the Lord should lift his hand out
from under us, we'd all plunge down and
be gone forever.
Only the goodness of God.
And there's lots of things wrong with us.
No question about that.
But I ask of the great tall, what
was his name, Palmer, Noel Palmer, the great
tall fellow.
He was close to eight feet, or was
it seven feet, seven foot something.
He married the daughter of Bramwell Booth, and
she was almost as tall as he, and
they sang a duet one time in our
old building.
And I stood up alongside of him, you
know, come just a little above his knee.
And there we were.
Well, he was a great big, great big
expansive Salvation Army fellow.
And I said to him, brother, brother Palmer,
what about, what about sanctification and the heart?
What about it?
Well, he said, I'll tell you, brother Tozer,
I believe if the heart loves God and
wants to do right, God will overlook an
awful lot of blemishes.
He says, if the heart loves God tremendously
and is on God's side and determined to
do right, God will overlook a lot of
flaws in the life.
I felt good over that, because I knew
there were flaws.
And you don't have to be flawless to
be blessed.
You only have to have a big heart
that wants the will of God more than
anything else in the world, and that has
a single eye single to his glory.
I tell you, no censoriousness is intended.
And for those who do things otherwise, we're
sorry, but we're not going to spend a
major part of our time condemning them.
We're just going to police our own church
and see that these are the things that
matter here.
The word of the living God, sweet music,
answers to prayer, occasional wonderful coming out into
a fullness of joy by some Christian, and
the sweet friendliness, plus the good words from
the pulpit and the personal interest in each
other and love for each other.
These are the things that matter, exercising the
gifts of God's Spirit, energized by the Spirit.
And though we may not build big, as
the world sees it, we'll build forever.
And that's what I'm for, my brethren.
And I wouldn't want a dime of your
money or a minute of your time if
I couldn't guarantee to you that you could
build forever.
I don't guarantee you will, because motive is
everything, and I don't know your motive.
But I can guarantee that you can build
forever by the grace of God, and you
can do things that will be here after
you're gone.
Wonderful to leave something behind you after you're
gone.
Say, by the grace of God, he enabled
me to do this.
Maybe it's only the winning of a boy,
a wild boy, but oh, why did I
say only the winning of a wild boy?
If you were the parents, you wouldn't want
me to say only the winning of a
wild boy, that Christ is more wonderful than
the establishing of a great institution.
And if you're ready to go along this
way and let Jesus Christ be our joy,
let him be our delight, be in love
with the Savior, and let him be your
joy and your happiness, for we're going to
go places.
We've been hit, as I said at the
beginning, we've been hurt here on the South
Side by a terrific change, and many, many
people moving away and going to other parts
of the country and other parts of the
world and leaving us.
We've noticed that.
But there are a lot of us around
here that still have a private line to
the throne of God, and we're going to
see God do greater things in the next
month than we've seen him do in all
the years that I've been here.
I can promise you that if we will
obey God and do what we should do.
Amen?
Amen.
All right, Brother Mack.